by Tal Bauer
“Who are you?” Dennis frowned back at David. “I don’t recall seeing you on the list of cleared personnel.”
“Him? He’s just the medic,” Paul said.
“And the medic is in the command center?” Dennis’s gaze bounced from David to Kris. He scowled.
Kris held his glare. Behind him, he felt David’s fury build, felt it grow and press on the walls, until the room was choked with his raw emotion.
“What’s the nature of this change?” Naveen asked Dennis, cracking the tension. “What exactly are you planning on doing here?”
“We’re going to force him into submission. Send him the message that we know he’s been playing games. We know his little tricks. His pretense. He needs to know that his games are over and we’re not going to indulge him any longer.”
“But he’s been cooperating!” Kris shouted.
“He doesn’t know what cooperation is. He sees you as a tool, someone to manipulate, and he’s been successful so far. He’s got a comfy bed, blankets, food. Why should he do anything differently when he’s in the best space he’s ever been in?” Dennis glared at them both, but most especially at Kris.
“He’s fucking miserable! He’s away from his brothers, he’s been captured by his worst enemy. He sobs at night when he thinks we aren’t watching on the cameras. You think he’s fucking happy?”
“He’s doing a hell of a lot better here than he would be in some cave in Afghanistan. Of course he’s happy.” Dennis seemed shocked Kris had talked back to him, challenged him.
“He’d give anything to go back. Be with his brothers. You’re so fucking ignorant. You have no idea what the hell you’re saying.”
Dennis scoffed. “Well. He’s certainly convinced you of his little act, Mr. Caldera. But that ends. Now.”
“What do you really know of Zahawi?”
“I’ve read the reports.”
“That’s all?”
Dennis stayed silent.
“Why don’t you try to understand him first, spend a moment actually listening to him, before you tell me what he’s like. I’ve been by his side every day for two months now!”
“And that’s the problem. You’ve gotten too close.” Dennis shook his head, like he was shaking Kris off. “We’re changing his world. He needs to earn his comfort, his care. He needs to understand that we own him. We control him. When he’s good, he gets rewarded. But when he’s bad, and when he doesn’t cooperate, he gets punished.”
“He’s not a fucking dog!” David shouted. “He’s not a fucking animal or a slave! He’s a human being!”
“He’s a terrorist! He’d kill you if you gave him a knife! Slit your fucking throat! Didn’t you see what happened to that journalist in Pakistan? You think Zahawi would think twice about beheading you?”
“Do you have any experience with Islamic extremists? With ideologically driven hatred? With anyone incarcerated in the third world or in repressive regimes?” Kris groaned, clenching his hands. “He’s prepared himself for all of that and more. He’s expecting to be tortured, to be beaten, to be sodomized, for his family to be attacked and killed in front of him. He’s ready to die for his cause! What can you possibly do that will break that resolve? He came apart when I was kind to him. That was unexpected to him.”
“It’s human nature,” Dennis said simply. “He’ll collapse. They always do.”
“You are going to reinforce what he expects. You will harden him.”
“Caldera, listen,” Paul interrupted, spreading his hands sanctimoniously, a smug look on his face. “Washington has made the call. This isn’t your show anymore. Dennis is in charge.”
Dennis took a breath, visibly trying for calm. His cheeks were red, his eyes bright. “Tomorrow, Zahawi’s interrogation changes. Caldera, you’re staying here because we need your knowledge base on Zahawi. But you’re not going in there again. His friendship with you is over.”
“It wasn’t friendship—”
“Boyfriends, then?” Paul quipped. “Looked like you two were having a hell of a time together.”
David burst around the table, charging Paul and shoving him against the wall. Pictures of Zahawi crumpled behind Paul’s back. David fisted Paul’s shirt, grabbing him with both hands until his knuckles went white.
“Whoa, whoa!” Paul held up his hands, disgust crawling over his face. He glared at David. “What the fuck?”
Naveen, at the end of the table, had his hand on his hip like he was reaching for his weapon. He wasn’t armed, though. Not at the CIA site. He froze, his eyes darting from David to Kris and back.
“Understand this,” Kris hissed, his voice, his body, shaking. “I will do whatever it takes. Anything at all. To prevent another attack. I will never, ever watch our people die again. Not while I can do something, anything to prevent it. So, if I have to joke with Zahawi? If I have to sit at his bedside? If I have to hold his fucking hand, be the one human being he thinks understands him? I will fucking do it. I will do it every Goddamn day!”
Silence.
Kris felt Naveen’s stare, the burn of his eyes into the side of his face. Once, months ago, Naveen had spit fury at Kris, blaming him for the attacks. He’d been right, of course. It had been Kris’s fault.
But it never would be again.
Paul shoved David back. “Get the fuck off me,” he growled. “And get the fuck out of the command center. You shouldn’t even be in here.”
Without looking at Kris, David stormed out. The room trembled, concrete walls shaking, as he slammed the door behind him.
Dennis straightened his shirt. “Washington has made the call. I’m in charge now. Starting tomorrow, we’re moving him out of his hospital room and into a real cell. Make him feel like the criminal he is. We’re taking everything away. He has to earn what he gets. All the way down to his clothes.”
Days passed.
Kris watched, over the monitors, as Zahawi was sedated, stripped, and moved into a dirt-floored cell. Four brilliant halogen lights hung above him, burning on Zahawi around the clock. He was given one metal chair. The temperature was dropped, the air conditioning cranked up until it was frigidly cold.
Paul had taken over the questioning at Dennis’s command, donning all black and covering his face with a balaclava. The first day of Zahawi’s new interrogation, Paul had strode in and bellowed at Zahawi to get up, get up against the wall. Zahawi had scrambled, moving as fast as he could hobble with his still-healing injuries.
“We know you’re playing games with us, Zahawi!” Paul had roared. “We know you’re lying! We know everything about you! We own you! And we’re going to break you, until you tell us what we want to know!”
“I have told everything—”
“You haven’t! You’re lying!”
“I have told everything—”
“When you lie to me, you will get punished.”
And Paul had left.
Cold, alone, and naked, Zahawi had huddled against the wall for hours.
Zahawi stopped talking the third day Paul barged in, all hours of the day and night, demanding information and calling Zahawi a liar. He stared beyond Paul, eyes vacant, trying to hide his nudity, cover himself as best he could.
Paul scoffed, snorting as his attempts. “I don’t care about your little dick, Zahawi. We grow them bigger in America.”
“We need to rattle him,” Dennis said one day. “I’m going to blast music into his cell. Until he begs for us to turn it off.”
Zahawi didn’t beg. He sat on the floor, eyes closed, stone-faced, until Paul stormed in again. Every time Paul entered, Zahawi jumped up against the wall. He stopped trying to cover himself. He held his chin high.
Kris was torn between staying and enduring alongside Zahawi, and fleeing, escaping to the other side of the compound, the silence of his shared hut with David. But, even there, the walls shook, reverberating off the quiet force of David’s rage.
As much as Kris hated Dennis, hated Paul, David’s hatred went d
eeper. Darker. Kris felt earthquakes in David’s soul, tremors in his body every time they touched. Darkness filled David’s gaze.
But he refused to speak about it.
When the music failed, Dennis ordered Zahawi be kept awake. Sleep deprivation, and lots of it.
“How the fuck will you know that you’re getting any real intelligence or just the firings of an exhausted mind?” Kris snapped.
“That’s your job,” Dennis snapped back. “Aren’t you the Zahawi expert?”
Zahawi was kept awake for two days, forced to sit upright on the metal chair, his hands cuffed behind him. Anytime he slouched or his eyes slipped closed, Paul, or another all-black-clad officer, was there to scream at him, force him to wake up.
Once, Dennis uncuffed his hands, offered Zahawi a crayon, and held out a notepad. “He’ll write intelligence down, and he won’t know he’s doing it.”
Zahawi stared at the crayon, and then at Dennis. He dropped the crayon.
“Start it all over,” Dennis said. “The music. And then the sleep deprivation. He gets sixteen hours to rest before we begin again.”
“Why the fuck has the intel from Zahawi stopped?” George, in Islamabad, shouted over the phone at Kris. “What the hell is happening down there?”
“Ask your friends at Langley. They sent some clown here from Psych 101 and told him he would be the one to make Zahawi talk. Never mind that Zahawi’s been talking to me just fine.” Kris paced away from the command center, sucking down his cigarette.
In the distance, David jogged around the airstrip, shirtless, his running shorts sliding up his thighs. Sweat slicked down his skin. Kris wanted to get lost in his back, press his face to David’s skin until he could transport out of there, reappear on a beach somewhere, where the sweat was from the sun and the sand and not the humidity and the rage, the futility of watching their interrogation go to waste.
David had gone quiet since Dennis had thrown him out of the bunker. Rage pulsed off him constantly. Kris spent most of his time in the interrogation cells, watching the monitors as Paul and Dennis tried to break Zahawi. Dennis kept the interrogations random, going at all hours, trying to disrupt Zahawi’s sense of time and place. Kris was keeping to the same schedule, awake for almost twenty-two hours a day. When he finally collapsed in their bed in their hut, David was usually gone, out pounding the runway or working out in the makeshift gym he and the rest of the Special Activities Division—SAD—guys had created. Steel rods with concrete on the ends were the dumbbells and barbells, along with old tires and pieces of chain.
“The word on the street is that Zahawi is the number three man in al-Qaeda. He needs to give up the goods on Bin Laden. Where is he hiding? What plans have they set in motion? What’s the next play?”
“He’s given up all their current plans. He’s given up what he knows about the leadership. He doesn’t know where Bin Laden is, though. He says no one does. Bin Laden’s in hiding. From everyone.”
“That’s bullshit. Someone knows. The number three in al-Qaeda has to know. They have an organization to run.”
“George, I’m telling you. He doesn’t. I think we’ve tapped him dry for actionable intel. Now we need to focus on operations. Understanding what’s what in al-Qaeda. Who’s who, and what their history has been. Who believes what, who is married to whose sister? Where are the loyalties, where are the weak spots? What can we exploit? We need a picture of their organization from the inside. He won’t tell us that while he’s sleep deprived.”
“What are you saying?”
“This quack and his crazy attempts to break Zahawi are only doing harm. Zahawi has given us what he knows.”
“Kris… Are you willing to put the lives of everyone in the US at risk for that statement? Are you positive, dead positive, that he’s said everything?” George sighed. His breath crackled over the scratchy cell connection. “Are you willing to risk another nine-eleven?”
Fire bloomed behind his eyelids, concrete dust and ash falling from the sky. Tumbling Towers, blocks falling down. The Pentagon, one side gone, and a tower of black smoke rising over DC.
He stopped, tipped his head back. Stared at the sky. It was gray, rolling with monsoon clouds that threatened torrents of rain, storms that would shake their world to the foundations.
“There’s a new directive that’s come from the White House. Straight from the lips of the vice president to Director Thatcher. ‘If there’s a one percent chance that something is possible, we act like it’s a certainty.’ There’s no room for error anymore. If it’s possible that Zahawi is holding back…” George trailed off.
“What they’re doing, George… It isn’t right. They’re on a dangerous path. How far will they go?”
George sighed again, long and low. “What else can we do? How can we know for sure? Really know?”
He watched David run, watched his shoulders heave, his chest rise and fall, as the skies split open again and the rain started to pour.
Another jet landed on the rain-soaked runway. The tires sprayed an arc of water, sluicing over the wings of the jet. Rain pounded the soaked compound in a never-ending staccato drumbeat. It sounded like the rock music Dennis blared into Zahawi’s cell. Like Zahawi, they couldn’t turn it off.
Kris waited under the overhang. David wasn’t with him. They’d been by each other’s side for eight months straight, day in and day out, through combat zones and undercover operations, from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Thailand. But David had slipped away over the past week, disappearing from his side like the humid mist of the jungle bleeding away. Kris ached for him, felt his absence like a physical hole he might fall into.
Two familiar men came off the jet, running through the rain to meet Kris.
“George sent us. Said you might need some help.” Ryan shook his head. Water droplets went flying. His duffel was soaked, just from the run.
Dan, beside Ryan, smiled at Kris. His sunglasses had fogged from the humidity. He pushed them up, into his wavy black hair. Rain dripped from his jaw, highlighting the angles, the sharp square of his bones. Kris had never seen Dan out of a sport coat. His polo clung to his surprisingly broad shoulders. Raindrops traced down muscled forearms, raced over his smooth skin. He was a handsome man; Kris had never noticed.
“The prisoners are running the asylum.” Kris guided them through the compound. “Dennis, a psychologist who has never worked with Islamic radicals, or even interrogated anyone before, is in charge. He’s trying to break Zahawi.”
“What’s the problem?” Ryan, as usual, was gruff. “We’re not feeding this detainee milk and cookies.”
“No, but my interrogation was going just fine. I got mountains of intel through rapport building. This is bullshit.”
“We’re all on the same team here,” Dan jumped in as Ryan opened his mouth, a scowl on his face. “We all want the same outcome. Good intelligence. The homeland protected. Let’s figure out how we can all get that.”
Ryan’s mouth snapped shut. He glowered, but didn’t argue.
Dan smiled at Kris behind Ryan’s back.
Two giant security guards, SAD officers who hung out with Paul, stopped them outside the interrogation bunker. “You aren’t allowed in.”
“Excuse me?” Kris, though not actively involved in questioning Zahawi any longer, still was on the command team of the detention site. “What the fuck did you say?”
“Paul’s orders. You’re not allowed in today.”
Ice wrapped around Kris’s spine, a ribbon that twirled down his bones and squeezed. What were Dennis and Paul doing? What didn’t they want anyone to see? “Get out of my way,” Kris growled.
“Sir—”
“Sir! That’s right! Because I am fucking in charge of Zahawi, no matter what the fuck Dennis or Paul told you! Who are you to keep me out? Get the fuck out of my way!”
The SAD officer’s eyes slid sideways to Ryan. Ryan nodded. Finally, the guard stepped one half step to the side. Kris had to squeeze past him to open
the door.
The stench hit him first.
Human feces. Sweat. Adrenaline. The stink of pure terror, animalistic fear.
Whimpering, and then screams. Shrieks and babbled Arabic, nonsensical.
Paul’s voice, bellowing. “I want the names, email addresses, phone numbers, and safe houses of all your fucking brothers who are planning on attacking the United States! Give me the information I want, Zahawi! Give it to me, or your life gets worse!”
“I don’t know!” Zahawi wailed.
Kris ran.
The interrogation bunker was long, with only one entrance. At the far side, they’d built Zahawi’s cell inside a freestanding isolation room. Outside the isolation room, banks of monitors showed the inside of his cell from every angle, in vivid Technicolor.
Dennis stood before the monitors, watching Zahawi’s tearstained face grimace and wail.
Kris ran, shouting. “What the fuck are you doing? What the fuck is going on here?” Footsteps echoed behind Kris, Ryan and Dan racing after him.
Dennis shoved a single sheet of paper right in Kris’s face. “White House authorization. The president has authorized enhanced interrogation techniques against uncooperative detainees.”
Kris’s eyes darted over the classified memo. “Slamming into walls? Beating him? Confinement? Stress positions?” He read on. “You’re using his fears against him! Putting insects in a confinement box with him?” Zahawi had told him, weeks ago, his biggest fear was bugs, especially ones that stung or bit. He’d been petrified of the desert scorpions, of the bugs in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Of the spiders.
His gaze skittered to a stop over the last two techniques. “Mock burial?” he breathed. “Waterboarding?”
Ryan appeared beside him in time to hear Kris’s last words. He snatched the paper out of Dennis’s hands.
“He’s not giving up all that he knows! This is how we protect the homeland, Caldera! This is how we get through to these people that we mean business!” Dennis snarled.
“This isn’t legal—” Dan began.